Monday, September 29, 2008


After four months without the ABC, Sam realised two things: 1) that The Gruen Transfer has made everyone experts on media and advertising analysis and 2) that he will spend the rest of his days and money attempting to procure a drumkit, a gorilla costume, a video camera and tickets to every simian revival rock concert that comes to town.


Sunday, September 28, 2008



It was just after the owner of the caravan park said that she didn't like my t-shirt because of her "strong ties of Buddhism" that I stopped communicating with fully-formed words and started using my wide command of grunts, nods and smiles.

Saturday, September 27, 2008


Dream interpretation: they are just the brain's way of using the massive amount of information it gathers and stores to consider the past, ruminate upon the present and plan for the future.


Friday, September 26, 2008


I'm so damn old-school that I watch The Simpsons on analogue broadcast with the ads.


Wednesday, September 24, 2008


The difference between my high school and Mele's is that they taught us about baby-making in Biology rather than Home Economics.


Tuesday, September 23, 2008


The Coffee Club on Bribie Island does not distribute the tips dropped by customers
into the bulbous green tip jar to its employees.


Monday, September 22, 2008


I often I wake up next to Mele scratching furiously in her sleep after a waking dream that a wolf has dragged us into its subterranean den and is devouring her body while I struggle to wake and save her.



Sunday, September 21, 2008


I propose a new blogging standard: Franzy's Law states that referring to one's own blog or blogging activities as a "rant" or "ranting" shall designate the author incapable of expressing ideas without resorting to violence or anger and thus the kind of person not really worth reading until they can calm down and relate their ideas properly without shouting or "talking foolishly".

Saturday, September 20, 2008


The phrase "wrong on so many levels" is only used by people who, when pressed, won't be able to come up with more than a few levels of wrongness and are
, unsurprisingly, also the kind of people who are more likely to confuse "few" with "many".


Friday, September 19, 2008


I wonder if there is a definitive point at which the damage done by the immediate stress of needing something you have thrown away outweighs the effects of the residual stress resulting from keeping some useless piece of crap, moving it from house to house, arguing over its possible value, defending it from efficient loved ones and finding ever larger spaces in which to store it, all the while convincing yourself that some day 46 pillowcases might just come in handy.


Thursday, September 18, 2008


I wonder if blogging has genuinely helped a generation to communicate its feelings, thoughts and emotions more succinctly or whether it has now become acceptable to simply hyphenate a long stream-of-consciousness descriptive passage in an I'm-really-enthusiastic-about-writing-and-want-to-appear-creative-and-intelligent-but-can't-quite-bring-myself-to-go-to-all-the-trouble-of-thinking-of-an-appropriate-metaphor-or-even-a-simile-when-I-can-simply-diarise-whatever-I'm-thinking-without-filters-or-editing-or-snipping-of-tangents-while-still-throwing-in-a-few-pop-culturally-acceptable-but-still-cool-and-quirky-as-the-comeback-of-the-cowbell-references-which-prove-that-this-is-really-the-only-path-towards-clear-written-expression-that-English-teachers-and-politicians-hope-for-in-the-yoof-ov-2day-which-isn't-splattered-with-textlish-and-smiley-faces-and-so-will-have-to-do-until-someone-can-work-out-a-way-of-making-spending-a-week-producing-a-single-metaphor-into-an-immediately-pleasurable-exercise kind of way in order to convey one's thoughts.


Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Tuesday, September 16, 2008


I know the
Domino's Cheaper Tuesday commercial is supposed to make me want to buy shithouse pizzas but for some reason it sends me straight to Google.


Sunday, September 14, 2008



Religion is like abortion: a personal decision which should be influenced by no one else, ever.


Saturday, September 13, 2008

Friday, September 12, 2008



Then there was the time I decided to spice up the beef stir fry with some cumin and discovered just how poorly the edge of your vision is able to distinguish between the words 'cumin' and 'cinnamon' when you are rifling through the spice cupboard with one eye on an ex-non-stick fry pan.



Thursday, September 11, 2008


The squinty-eyed, jut-jawed handshakes which were gripped across the kitchen table that evening after we at last tumbled upon the Collins Shortened only to discover that the word 'automated' actually fulfilled the seemingly-opposing definitions defended as unassailable gospel by each hubristic generation were as meaningful as oil region peace accords, twice as tense and productive of a ceasefire over matters grammatical, syntactical and punctuational which possessed only a fraction of the tendency to longevity.



Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Tuesday, September 9, 2008


When the naughties have died and been reborn in a premature haze of nostalgia marketing and retro-dollar love-ins, I will feed my progeny for generations to come with my one-hit-wonder super group: 'Youtube Sensation'.


Saturday, September 6, 2008



Last night on SBS I saw an old Palestinian re
fugee in a bombed-out township talk about the hurt and bloodshed that his family had been through with his grandson standing behind him; listening, watching, picking his nose and eating it.


Thursday, September 4, 2008

Wednesday, September 3, 2008


You know you're an adult when you discover that there are much more mortifying things to be seen buying at a chemist than condoms.


Tuesday, September 2, 2008


The Queensland tradition of giving everything Aboriginal names after carefully removing all traces of Aboriginal from them is like Muslim extremists colonising Manhattan and renaming it
Twin Tower Tumble Island.

Monday, September 1, 2008



My sneezes often smell like I've snorted the dust off the top of a wet dictionary; the kind printed in an era during which masturbation was described as "
v. self-abuse".


An explanation of The Joy Division Litmus Test

Although it may now be lost in the mysts of thyme, the poll below is still relevant to this blog. In the winter of 2008, Mele and I went to live in Queensland. In order to survive, I bluffed my way into a job at a Coffee Club.
It was quite a reasonable place to work: the hours were regular, the staff were quite nice, it wasn't particularly taxing on my brain.
There were a few downsides: In the six weeks or so that I worked there, there was about a 90% staff turnover (contributed to by my leaving). This wasn't seen as a result of the low pay, the laughability of staff prices or the practice of not distributing tips to staff, rather it was blamed on the lack of work ethic among Bribie Island's youth.
However, one of the stranger aspects of the cultural isolation that touched our lives during our time "up there" was the fact that nobody at my work had heard of the band Joy Division.
The full explanation is available here.
But please, interact a little further and vote in my ongoing poll. The results are slowly mounting up, proving one thing: people read this blog are more well-informed about Joy Division than anyone who works at the Coffee Club on Bribie Island.

Have you heard of the band Joy Division?

Chinese food, not Chinese Internet!

Champions of Guess The Header

  • What is Guess The Header about? Let’s ask regular “Writing” reader, Shippy: "Anyway, after Franzy's stunning September, and having a crack at 'Guess The Header' for the first time - without truly knowing what I was doing mind you - I think I finally understand what 'GTH' is all about. At first I thought you needed to actually know what it was. Don't get me wrong — if you know what it is, it may help you. I now realise that it's more Franzy's way of invoking thought around an image or, more often than not, part of an image. If you dissect slightly the GTH explanatory sentence at the bottom of his blog you come up with this: “The photo is always taken by me and always connects in some way to the topic of the blog entry it heads up.” When the header is put up, the blog below it will in some obscure way have something to do with it. “Interesting comments are judged and scored arbitrarily and the process is open to corruption and bribery with all correspondence being entered into after the fact and on into eternity, ad infinitum amen.” Franzy judges it, but it's not always the GTH that describes the place perfectly that gets it. “The frequent commenters, the wits, the wags and the outright smartarses who, each entry, engage to both guess the origin and relevance of the strip of photo at the top (or “head”) of each new blog and also who leave what I deem the most interesting comment.” It generally helps if you're a complete smartarse and can twist things to mean whatever you feel they should mean - exactly the way Franzy would like things to be twisted." - Shippy Blogger and GTH point scorer.
  • Nai - 1
  • Lion Kinsman - 2
  • Will - 2
  • Brocky - 2
  • Andy Pants - 2
  • The 327th Male - 3
  • Mad Cat Lady - 3
  • Miles McClagen - 4
  • Myninjacockle - 4
  • Asheligh - 5
  • Neil - 5
  • Third Cat - 5
  • Adam Y - 6
  • Squib - 6
  • Mele - 6
  • Moifey - 7
  • Jono - 8
  • The Other, other Sam - 14
  • Kath Lockett - 15
  • Shippy - 19
  • River - 32